War instead of Champions League – Sport

After the usual hibernation at the beginning of the year, the pool swimmers will appear again this Friday at the Berlin Swim Open – and it is a trend-setting competition for the local elite. After all, in the capital until Sunday it is also about qualifying for the World Championships in Budapest in June and the European Championships in Rome in August. Berlin is just one way to beat the standard times; until the qualifying window closes on April 14, the Europeans can consider other venues, such as Eindhoven or Stockholm.

The major events in Budapest and Rome are already casting their shadows in the post-Olympic year. However, a completely different format is now missing from the competition calendar – much to the regret of many professional swimmers, especially those who can just keep their heads above water financially: the International Swimming League, or ISL for short.

The private, highly exciting format was launched in 2018 by the Ukrainian billionaire Konstantin Grigorishin as a global team competition in which the best swimmers in the world should compete. The idea: Ten teams stationed in North America, Europe and Asia compete against each other in large, glittering halls in Rome, Budapest or Las Vegas. LED shows and DJs included. In 2022, the ISL should have entered its fourth season. But at the end of March, the company announced that it had to postpone the competitions to 2023 because of the war in Ukraine. The founder Grigorishin comes from the eastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia, where the Russian war of aggression is now raging on the banks of the Dnieper. It is said that Grigorishin’s energy company operates almost exclusively in Ukraine. The rich ISL patron should have other worries than paying out a total of $13 million in prize money to athletes in a kind of Champions League of swimming, as he had planned for this season.

For swimmers who are not among the big earners in their sport like Sarah Sjöström, Adam Peaty, Caeleb Dressel or Lilly King, this year’s ISL-Aus is a nasty setback. And there are many of them. “Swimming isn’t exactly the best-paid sport. That’s why I was very grateful to the ISL for the financial support, also because I no longer had to work on the side,” says Kathrin Demler of the SZ. The 25-year-old was drafted for the defending champion Cali Condors in the ISL last year – and with teammates like Dressel or King behind the competitor Energy Standard (whose five Russian athletes Grigorishin was suspended because of the war in Ukraine) second. “I enjoyed racing with the best and wanted to do it again in 2022. It was an unforgettable, awesome experience,” says Demler.

Not only for sporting reasons – Grigorishin’s concern was also to let the more than 300 athletes who take part in the ISL every year benefit financially by means of a monthly basic income and bonuses. Those who pledged to compete in every ISL competition received more money, while those who wanted more flexibility received less. For example, Sjöstrom is said to have earned nearly $270,000 as the top earner in 2021. According to Demler, he received 1,500 euros a month for ten months in 2020, plus bonuses. The following year, her basic earnings were lower, but there were higher bonuses. That was important for someone who has only been in the perspective squad of the German Swimming Association (DSV) since October 2021 and has received a few hundred euros in support from Sporthilfe since then.

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The ISL sounds like a small paradise, but it was not a paradise on earth for the swimmers who finally wanted to step out of the shadow of far more popular sports. Several athletes reported that premium payments were still outstanding, so Peaty no longer competed in the ISL. DSV swimmer Christian Diener, who like Marco Koch took part in ISL competitions, also reported that he still lacked money. And Demler says: “I’m still waiting for certain parts of my income from last year, it’s all a bit uncertain.”

Criticism also came from the associations, for whom the ISL was always a thorn in the side. The World Swimming Federation Fina torpedoed Grigorishin’s project – which, it is said, once initiated because of his son’s enthusiasm for swimming – from the start. Ultimately without success. But the DSV still finds the series problematic, mainly because it doesn’t fit into its competition planning. “Basically, this is a highly interesting competition format, but the period of the ISL competitions has extended more and more, for 2022 it would have been more than half a year,” says DSV sports director Christian Hansmann of the SZ: “Our focus is on the EM, at the World Championships and at the Olympics, and not at the finals of the ISL. And that athletes come back to our competitions or training camps exhausted, we also have a small problem with that.”

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The fact that the Fina finally moved the World Championship, which was originally supposed to take place in Fukuoka in May in May, to the end of June in Budapest after a lot of back and forth, didn’t make the DSV exactly happy either. Because now the German championship is taking place in Berlin as part of the widely advertised “Finals” parallel to the World Cup. The national title fights will therefore have to do without their figurehead Florian Wellbrock, who is already qualified for the World Cup – and maybe also without Kathrin Demler, who starts in Berlin and could qualify there for the World Cup. She now has the focus, but less financial security.

The ISL meanwhile emphasized that it wants to settle all outstanding premium payments and has since changed the rules so that athletes can commute more flexibly between their competitions and those of the associations. And she concluded her announcement that she would skip this year with an almost pleading appeal: “The important thing is that the ISL does not go away. We will come back stronger.” The only question is when.